State house meeting on Open Document

[Rich Braun]

So Hiawatha Bray's at it again in the Saturday issue of the Globe, talking
about the evil movement toward OpenDocument on Beacon Hill.

It's amazing that this man managed to write a quite good article earlier in
the week, one which raised a privacy-rights issue in a relatively balanced
way:  the one about serial-number encoding in hardcopies produced by
off-the-shelf color laser printers.  (In fact I had not heard of this until
Bray's article.)  He even pointed out my favorite argument against intrusive
technology:  we might think highly of our own police and our own so-called
activist judges, but in other countries where this and other covert American
technology is adopted, such police and judicial power can be used to violently
throttle all forms of dissidence.

Anyway--I just don't see how Bray gets off on this tangent about how
OpenDocument is a Romney initiative.  Why would we in the open-software
movement want to prop up Romney by sharing the credit/blame for a relatively
innocuous standards initiative designed to benefit future generations of
individuals who want to comb through online warehouses of old government
documents?

The politics of this stinks.  I understand the concerns of the
disability-rights activists who rightly point out that the costly R&D efforts
put in by Microsoft and its ilk to (grudgingly) make MS Office software more
user-friendly to visually-handicapped people have yet to be replicated in
fully by the free-software contributors to OpenDocument.  But this is a
long-term strategy designed to open up Microsoft's file-format standards. 
Bray's approach undermines this strategy by causing people like me to question
whether we would want to lend our support to anything promoted by theocrats
like Romney.

Ugh.

-rich